13 September 2012

Simrad IS40 navigation display preview

At last week's HISWA in water boatshow the news from Navico was the new Simrad IS40 navigation display. It is a variation on the B&G Triton display, and is nearly identical.

Thus it has an excellent screen with a 170° viewing angle, uses little power (150 mA with lights on and 50 mA with lights off) and has nice clear and large displays.

At the moment there are two differences between them: the IS40 will be priced lower, but does not show the true wind angle arrow on the composite wind display. It was also hinted that the feature sets of both versions of this display would diverge in future software revisions of the firmware, with the Triton gaining additional high end features targeted towards racing sailors. The target market for the IS40 is recreational sailing boats and motorboats. This is the same market segmentation as seen with the Simrad NSE / B&G Zeus chartplotters.

Simrad IS40 with AWA shown digitally and as a vector, TWA shown digitally.

B&G Triton T41 with both AWA and TWA shown digitally and as a vector.

Other than this I could not find any difference between the two.

One thing that did strike me with these displays is that the above composite wind display is fixed, you cannot change any of the data points to show something else. This is strange as you can change the content of the data fields shown on other displays.

Update 19-Sep-2012:
These displays, together with the accompanying OP10 auto pilot remote, have now been officially announced at the Southampton Boat Show, and can be found on the Simrad Yachting website. The IS40, like the T41, has a female and male Micro-C connector. It apparently comes with a 90° angled NMEA 2000 connector to Simnet cable for easier integration into a Simnet network, but I haven't seen it so I cannot say what depth you need behind the display.